Jessie Robins grew up in Katherine in the Northern Territory as one of a set of triplets and the daughter of a helicopter mustering pilot, and – as she tells me in this new interview – she has been singing since she was a small child. Creativity also runs in the family as her sisters are also working in creative fields.
Robins now lives in Brisbane, where she performs regularly across the city and occasionally on Stradbroke Island, and she has released her debut country pop single, 'I Should Have Known Better'. The song was written with Shannon McArthur, a producer and songwriter living in Austin, Texas who is Robins’s longtime collaborator. They made a connection made through YouTube long before Zoom made remote creative partnerships commonplace.
Robins has been writing songs since childhood, and tells me that she still has notebooks from those years and occasionally finds a melody or a lyric she could use now. ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ came about through Robins watching a friend navigate a relationship from beginning to end, and the song sat with her for a couple of years before the timing felt right to release it.
‘Now that those circumstances have passed,’ she says, ‘I felt like it was the right time to move forward.’
The song's title implies regret, but the sound does not. Robins was deliberate about this – she wanted something people could put on in the car and feel okay about, not sad.
‘It’s okay to test things and trial things and then come out the other side with learnings,’ she says.
The genre of country music isn’t Robins’s natural habitat – she didn’t grow up listening to it. But over her years of performing and studying at JMC Academy in Brisbane, people kept telling her she sounded country. Eventually, she stopped resisting, and the result is this nuanced debut track.
Listen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on Apple Music
Listen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on Spotify
Listen to ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ on YouTube
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